Playing with Money

Once choking on change was no longer a hazard, we dumped a quart mason jar filled with quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies onto the carpet. My little one and I played in puddles of coins just like Donald Duck's nephews. We rolled in money, tossed it back and forth and made forts out of columns of pennies. Emily came to recognize the presidents' faces and differences in coin shapes the more she handled and sorted them. And honestly, who could ever tire of rolling in money? As Emily got older, we replaced the fake money for real money in our board games. Presto Chango and Monopoly are a lot more fun when you're counting up the real thing.

When Emily was four, we started an allowance system. Each Monday morning Emily received her age in one dollar bills stuffed neatly into the napkin holder on the kitchen table. She had until Saturday dinner to complete her four-year-old chores. The dollar bills served as "the nag" as they were forever falling out at each meal whenever we grabbed for a napkin. Emily had all week to empty bathroom garbage cans, to squirt down bathroom sinks and counters with vinegar  water and to wash the windows of the front door. If her chores hadn't been completed in time, the money disappeared and she had to do her chores after supper that night without receiving her allowance for the week. The next Monday morning though, four dollar bills would once again appear in the napkin holder as a reminder to complete her work sometime during the week. 

It was really hard as a parent to allow Emily to fail - sometimes several weeks in a row - but we let the napkin holder do its thing and eventually she got better at remembering. On weeks when Emily received her $4 for completing her chores, she distributed one dollar into each of four mason jars she'd decorated. One had an ice cream cone on it. (That was for impulse buying). One had a picture of something she was saving up for. Another had a red cross on it for whatever charity she wanted to give money to and the last one had a picture of a house drawn on it with the words "college" written under it. Every birthday another dollar was added to the napkin holder and another job was added to her list of chores. One dollar always went into each of the four mason jars, and as her allowance grew, Emily was allowed to divvy up the rest in whatever ways she saw fit. She sometimes asked us to break a one so she could have more control over how she divided the extra dollars in her allowance.

When the ice cream truck came down the street playing its signature tune of, "I had a little chicken and it wouldn't lay an egg" all the kids ran home as fast as they could to get money to buy popsicles and ice cream sandwiches. When Emily burst through the front door huffing and puffing she asked,

     "Mommy, can I have money for the ice cream truck?" 

     "Sure," I said. "You can use the money in your impulse buying jar or you can grab a free popsicle from our freezer and eat it outside with your friends."  

Sometimes Emily would buy the red, white and blue rocket popsicles from the ice cream truck and sometimes she'd go with the free grape juice popsicles in our home freezer. When her friends invited her to go to a movie one time, she couldn't go because her "impulse buying" jar was empty. Next to giving birth to her, this was the hardest thing I ever did. My husband and I allowed her to miss the movie. We comforted her and offered to watch a movie with her from our video collection at home. After that, I noticed that Emily started eating more popsicles out of the freezer and made sure she never completely drained her impulse jar. It felt good to see her making choices about how she was deciding to spend and save her money. 

Emily was also really proud of her work around the house. At four, it was her job to wash the narrow window panels on either side of the front door. Right after she'd completed her window washing one day and we were sitting down to dinner, the neighbor girl Paige rang the doorbell with her nose pressed impatiently against the glass. Emily melted a bit in her seat and tisk-tisked, 

     "Oh No! Not on my nice clean windows!" 

Each time Emily's college jar reached $50, I'd buy Exxon stock. Sitting on the porch swing in the garage with Exxon's Annual Report in her little lap, she checked up on her investment by looking carefully at all the pictures. She also enjoyed watching her money grow when I showed her the quarterly statements.

When Emily turned 14 the allowance ended, and she got a weekend job at the neighborhood bakery. We stopped using the mason jars and left it to her to manage her giving, spending and saving. But in those ten years of saving and 14 years of growth, Emily's college Exxon stock grew to $1,200. She's used this money to purchase college text books. With careful planning, renting books, sharing with friends and buying used and selling, she's managed to stretched her Exxon funds so they'll cover her for all four years. It's popsicles all over again.